(a) Field
The present application relates to a liquid crystal display.
(b) Description of the Related Art
A liquid crystal display is one of flat panel displays that have been most widely used, includes two display panels on which a field generating electrode such as a pixel electrode and a common electrode is formed, and a liquid crystal layer disposed between the two display panels.
The liquid crystal display displays an image by applying a voltage to the field generating electrode to generate an electric field in the liquid crystal layer, determining alignment of liquid crystal molecules of the liquid crystal layer through the electric field, and controlling polarization of incident light.
The liquid crystal display also includes a switching device connected to each pixel electrode and a plurality of signals such as a gate line, a data line, etc. for controlling the switching device and for applying a voltage to the pixel electrode.
Among such liquid crystal displays, a vertically aligned (VA) mode liquid crystal display in which a major axis of liquid crystal molecules is disposed to be perpendicular to a display panel in a state in which an electric field is not applied has attracted much attention due to a higher contrast ratio and a wide reference viewing angle. Here, the reference viewing angle refers a luminance reversal critical angle between grays or a viewing angle with a contrast ratio of 1:10.
For this type of liquid crystal display, a method for changing transmittance by dividing one pixel into two subpixels and applying different voltages of the two respective subpixels has been proposed in order to approximate side visibility to front visibility.
However, when one pixel is divided into two subpixels and transmittance is changed for the two subpixels to approximate side visibility to front visibility, luminance is increased from low gray or high gray and it is difficult to represent gray at a lateral side, and thus a problem arises in that an image quality is degraded.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.